09 May 2013

QGIS equals no need for ESRI anymore.

Why, with the up and coming of QGIS 2.0 (currently at 1.9 alpha)Why the big move, simply to save money.Over the years Quantum GIS has come a long way, large community, lots of talented programmers giving up their time to create a Open Sourced GIS.

For us we use oracle there is a custom built model that needs to be forced into an ESRI to fit their model to be used.We have materialized view, synonyms that need to be plain spatial tables

The key to this move is the direct connecting to Oracle. No need for ArcSDE or versions, just put in the connection details and load that data.A huge cost saving, when you have hundreds of users.What about the support?With the huge community base and other GIS community sites (GIS Stack Exchange) it is becoming more efficient to search and ask online than it is to have a technical person who does not have any knowledge of your GIS model.90% of our issue in-house are solved completely.What about the 10% in most cases there is a workaround the impact is the time to work on it. http://www.qgis.org/Download (current release 1.8) http://hub.qgis.org/projects/quantum-gis/wiki/Download

Nope. You're forgetting that 99% of GIS users aren't developers, and Esri presents a relatively straightforward suite which doesn't require 20 different repositories and 3 different sets of software for running advanced geoprocessing/analytical tasks. There's a role for QGIS, but the demise of Esri and ArcGIS is greatly exaggerated.